Unit 4 – Course Reflection

Course Reflection

First, I would like to thank you for allowing me to spend time getting to know these websites. I may have found them at a later date, but the sooner the better. When I get a break in my schedule I intend to try some out on Sweetwater’s sixth graders. They may or may not work but it is worth trying.

The Course started with using a blog. I have never used a blog before and I’m sure most of the class has not used one. The children we are teaching are using blogs and that is why we need to learn about them. I have a brother who is in 6^th grade and he is using blogs and making YouTube videos like it was second nature. If it’s second nature to him and not the teachers, where does this leave us as educators? Next year, the child will be using some other technology we’ve never heard of and we’ll be even farther behind. I am stressing this because even though some of my sites are filled with animation, I can barely keep up. Part of the reason I incorporate a lot of computer animation or programs into my work is because I am trying my best to learn what they already know. HTML is something all of us need to know how to use. When we publish a simple webpage on some free make a webpage site we tend to run into problems. Things won’t format the way we want or the picture we post keeps ending up in the same spot. The easiest thing to do is to go visit Barnes and Noble and find a Complete HTML book. Start by reading the first section, then use the rest of the book for reference. As teachers and not computer programmers, you might be laughing at me for writing this. Don’t laugh because our middle grades children are doing this by looking up the information on the web. Again we are behind our students.

The class continued with getting us used to the idea of going to the internet for information that we have not looked up previously. The different sites that we looked up to find lesson plans reinforced this idea. We were then given reading strategies to look for and this reinforced or even taught us things about reading we did not know. As I was searching for all these items, I came to learn a lot about the topic and how to teach the lessons better incorporating reading strategies. The final Unit brought us more into reading strategies and different articles directly dealing with how we can teach reading to our students. We then were given the opportunity to look for lesson plans that we could modify and use when we graduate from Appalachian.

Overall, I feel like I spent a lot of time on here learning about reading and learning about the Internet. But, isn’t that what we need to do when we teach our students? We need to incorporate technology along with incorporating reading and various other things into our teaching. That is what we as teachers do. We teach everything.